Over the last decade the growth in quality and value of on demand printing has never ceased to amaze me. What only companies could afford 10+ years ago for major events can now be purchased by an independent art gallery at a fraction of the price. For a while now when it came to printing it wasn’t a question of if something could beÂ afford-ablyÂ printed but more who do you trust to print it.

Having worked with companies that either printed overseas and you had long delays, color matching issues or just general customer services issues or ones that printed locally but quality was highly questionable at a 20% markup it was hard to have a good printer for long.

Then there is a company like iCanvasArt.com which is not only a Chicago based company but also has a drive to promote and expand contemporary art awareness. When I heard that they were selling high quality Banksy canvas prints and recently licesed Space Invader (now just Invader) prints I was even more interested.

Founded in 1999 by Leon Oks and Eugene Kharon in Chicago the business has grown and expanded all around the world and the quality hasn’t diminished. I had to check out what they do and personally got a museum streached canvas print of Banksy’s “Hirst spot painting with roller rat”.

First off I can not express how fast the turnaround was having the company print and ship out of Chicago. Comunication and tracking was top shelf and packaging when it arrived was secure and very liberal in its padding.

The canvas was properly streached without being too tight or the more often trait of so loose as to be unimaginable to hang. The entire purchasing process was fast, easy and almost without note which is what you want really in a transaction.

I say almost without note in that there were two comments:

The Banksy prints obviously are derived from photos taken onsite and have been highly cleaned up in photoshop and I might assume vectored. Which is great when printing large scale images to keep the sharpness of line and richness of colors withoutÂ noiseÂ or artifacts. The slight down side is the image has little gradient. Which with Banksy isn’t that much of an issue but could be in other vectored images where it is more human and less like a stencil. Easy way to solve this is give a cropped zoom in function to show what a few sections of the image would look at printed size. Then the buyer can be informed and aware to make the decision that is right for them.

The image gets cropped based on the canvas size you pick. Which is honestly both great and horrible. Its is great considering that the image when shipped is properly filling the canvas regardless of the size you pick, it looks great at anyÂ dimension. Horrible in that I hate croping pictures just as I hate Pan & Scan movies and was a tad caught by suprise by this when it arrived. This could be easily fixed by having the thumbnail actually reflect the final cropping that would happen at the selectedÂ dimensionÂ and have a gold highlighted (ideal dimention) canvas size highlighted. So the buyer could know if they want the full image at the correctÂ dimension, the gold one would be the best choice.

Those two comments aside iCanvasArt.com is a welcome addition to my list of online suppliers that can get the job done right the first time at a reasonable price. I am currious what other contempoary artists they can line up knowing how difficult that can be but also how important.